Sources and Tags: Dennis O'Connor's Curating Secrets

There's no question that Dennis O'Connor has found much success on Scoop.it. It wasn't all coincidental, though. Dennis shared with us two of his best curation secrets and tricks:

1. Develop multiple sources for your topicsIt's important to carefully think through the keywords that you set for your topic so that Scoop.it can crawl the web and provide you with interesting and relevant content and inspiration. In addition to taking full advantage of this, Dennis also uses other tools like Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Prismatic to find content to share on Scoop.it. Once he finds the content he wants to share with his audience, he uses Scoop.it as his social media hub to add value to that content and share it everywhere.

2. Tag your postsDennis takes a lot of time to tag each of his posts. This allows him, he explained, to assemble publications based upon his tagged topics. When he's using his information on Scoop.it for his E-learning classes, it's easy for him to filter his Scoop.it pages based upon different subjects and easily compile a list of posts and articles on appropriate topics to provide to his students. Something interesting that Dennis does with his tagged articles is to pull them by subject and create "special editions" of his topics on his blog for special classes and events that he is teaching.

While the original Scoop graphic and comments relate to 'curation skills' - I felt it was relevant to share with students as it offers a model incorporating 'ethical' consideration through the research process.

"The study examines students’ assessments of the use of the flipped classroom approach in an undergraduate course in the Business Department at the College for Academic Studies in Israel. In its essence, learners prepare for classes by watching videos away from class, allowing the classroom encounter to focus on discussion, exercises, and discourse. Data were collected by a questionnaire distributed toward the end of the course."

"Education is one of the fastest progressing industries. Today, research, materials and communication can be shared instantly and globally. However, information technology is hardly at its full potential, particularly in education. As a college senior set to graduate in 2015 and asked to write an essay about the future of higher education, here is what I see when I look into the crystal ball. By the year 2050 higher education will be transformed by three trends: automation, curation, and gamification."

School children in Uruguay are being taught English live from London, thanks to a unique videoconferencing project from the British Council and Plan Ceibal. Despite the two countries being over 6,000 miles apart, the tech-savvy initiative is using HD communications equipment to effectively link-up the classrooms across their two different continents.

Sway is a novel tool for building cloud based presentations. Sway offers a rapid design experience, focusing on the collation of images, text, and video, sourced from the web or your computer. It's a canvas for your ideas, quick to create, and easy to share. Sway is still in closed preview, but we were lucky enough to have been pulled out…

"What began as a routine summer workshop on incorporating games and game-like elements into instruction turned into the surprise of the summer; two weeks of fun and intense online game play by an engaged and committed cadre of faculty and staff who were working to apply the principles of gaming to their courses and student activities. I had planned to end the workshop with a two-week follow-up online game for participants, but I didn’t seriously think anyone would do it."

"It’s easy for an eLearner to “zone out” when faced with complex course content, especially with limited existing knowledge of a topic. The instructional design challenge is how to explain complex content easily. Start by considering some premises fundamental to eLearning design."

As we increasingly move towards designing our own eLearning content - it is essential to consider the delivery of that content - the tools are a means to an end - if the design quality is poor then the usefulness of those tools is greatly diminished.

For starters, long and focused study sessions may seem productive, but chances are you are spending most of your brainpower on trying to maintain your concentration for a long period of time. That doesn’t leave a lot of brain energy for learning.

This page contains tutorials for using Google tools. The tutorials that I've created you are welcome to use in your own blog, website, or professional development session. Before using the tutorials created by others, please contact their creators.
Via Dennis T OConnor

really similar to Kahoot. The only difference is that students get the multiple answer choices on their mobile devices. Works better on tablets I guess that on phones. A fun way to revise, study and learn.

Creating tutorials and explanatory guides is best done through the help of screenshots. These are pictures we take of our screens to share with others or include in a visual demonstration of how, for example, a process works. As teachers and educators we often find ourselves in need of such visual annotations and cues to enhance our students comprehensibility. There are several web tools that we can use to create screenshots and we have already reviewed some of them in past publications here. Today, we are introducing you to what we consider to be the best 4 web tools for creating screenshots. Besides being free, these tools are very simple to use and are also student friendly. They will allow you to capture your screen, crop and annotate your pictures using arrows, colours, shapes, text and many more.

More teachers are getting hold of iPads for their work, but how can they go about getting the most out of them? Primary school teacher and iPad-innovator Lee Parkinson discusses how teachers can use the device to bring very specific subjects to life.

Here are some real-world applications of tablet technology in the classroom. I see here some excellent integration of the technology into innovative learning experiences that any classroom with iPad access could easily incorporate.

Easy and efficient way to organize, structure and keep track of notes the way you want. Keep it simple or take it to the next level - advanced data management with unique type, tagging, templating and filtering features.

I lWearable sensors don't tend to do much; they're usually limited to health data like EKG readings or your heart rate. If BeBop Sensors has its way, though, they'll be useful for just about anything that comes in contact with your body.

"This paper shares practical examples for leaders to consider as they work to expand access to digital learning tools. With the shift to online assessments and increased national attention to the importance of personalizing our education system, ensuring equitable student access to high-quality digital learning tools and opportunities is one the most important issues of our time. Without full access, students will be cut off from the possibilities for the personalization and customization of learning, and the opportunities to develop deeper learning skills necessary for college and career readiness."

Those who scored high on the "media multitasking index" averaged more than three hours a day of multitasking, the study found. They also managed to complete an average of 3.5 hours of homework a day, all while juggling multiple tasks for more than 50 percent of this time.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.